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Electrical switching of the vortex core in a magnetic disk

Nature Materials volume 6, pages 270–273 (2007)Cite this article

Abstract

Amagnetic vortex is a curling magnetic structure realized in a ferromagnetic disk, which is a promising candidate for a memory cell for future non-volatile data-storage devices1. Thus, an understanding of the stability and dynamical behaviour of the magnetic vortex is a major requirement for developing magnetic data-storage technology. Since the publication of experimental proof for the existence of a nanometre-scale core with out-of-plane magnetization in a magnetic vortex2, the dynamics of vortices have been investigated intensively3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10. However, a way to electrically control the core magnetization, which is a key for constructing a vortex-core memory, has been lacking. Here, we demonstrate the electrical switching of the core magnetization by using the current-driven resonant dynamics of the vortex; the core switching is triggered by a strong dynamic field that is produced locally by a rotational core motion at a high speed of several hundred metres per second. Efficient switching of the vortex core without magnetic-field application is achieved owing to resonance. This opens up the potentiality of a simple magnetic disk as a building block for spintronic devices such as a memory cell where the bit data is stored as the direction of the nanometre-scale core magnetization.

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Figure 1: Perspective view of the magnetization with a moving vortex structure.
Figure 2: Core dynamics under a.c. spin-polarized current.
Figure 3: MFM observation of electrical switching of the vortex core.
Figure 4: Switching probabilities as a function of excitation current frequency.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partly supported by MEXT Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research in Priority Areas and JSPS Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research.

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Author notes

  1. Keisuke Yamada and Shinya Kasai: These authors contributed equally to this work

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Chemical Research, Kyoto University, Uji 611-0011, Japan

    Keisuke Yamada, Shinya Kasai, Kensuke Kobayashi & Teruo Ono

  2. University of Electro-communications, Chofu 182-8585, Japan

    Yoshinobu Nakatani

  3. Graduate School of Engineering Science, Osaka University, Toyonaka 560-8531, Japan

    Hiroshi Kohno

  4. Laboratoire de physique des solides, CNRS, Univ. Paris-Sud, 91405 Orsay, France

    André Thiaville

Authors
  1. Keisuke Yamada
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  2. Shinya Kasai
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  5. Hiroshi Kohno
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Correspondence to Teruo Ono.

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Yamada, K., Kasai, S., Nakatani, Y. et al. Electrical switching of the vortex core in a magnetic disk. Nature Mater 6, 270–273 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat1867

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